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Zellner, Bob

b. 1939

After teaching at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, Bob Zellner served as field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the first white southerner to do so. He was arrested 18 times in seven states, including on a criminal anarchy charge in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. During the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, Zellner accompanied Rita Schwerner when the disappearance of her husband and two other civil rights workers was being investigated. In 1967, after SNCC became an all-black organization, Zellner joined the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) to work with black and white workers through Grass Roots Organizing Work (GROW). He received his doctorate in history from Tulane in the early 1990s, doing his dissertation on the southern civil rights movement. His memoir The Wrong Side of Murder Creek, A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement was published in 2008.

Dr. King informs James Forman of SNCC that the SCLC will not be able to "defray the cost of the litigation" concerning Bob Zellner. He explains that a recent benefit event did not raise as much money as expected.

The Southern Conference Educational Fund writes a statement regarding "two young leaders of integration" who visited a fellow leader in jail and also got arrested. Charles McDew, a Negro and Chairman of the SNCC, and Robert Zellner, a white man and staff member of the SNCC, were charged with criminal anarchy just for bringing books and fruit to a friend who was arrested for participating in demonstrations.